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THE KEMPTON-WACE LETTERS
ridiculous and an offence to high heaven. Believe me, it is artifi cial. The true judge cares not for the fact of the deed, but for
its motive. And the lover knows the motive. He has the key to
the life. He knows his beloved, not as she is, but “as she was
born to be.” His lips press and his arms enfold not her so much
as the ideal of her, and unless she unmake herself, he cannot unlove her. “To judge a man by the fruit of his actions,”
says Professor Edward Howard Griggs, “it is necessary to know
all of the fruit, which is impossible. You can only know what
he eternally must be if you catch the aspect of his soul and
grow to understand his aspirations and his loves.” To idealise,
therefore, is not to be blind, but to be far-seeing.
There is another way of looking on this question of the paradox. Granted that it is caused by romantic love, romantic love
is still exclusively the best thing in the world. You cannot pay
too dearly for the good of life. I know that the misery of being in the intimacy of wedlock with one who is not loved is unutterable. It is to become degraded and unrecognisable, it is to
wear the brand of liar before God! The man whose outer life
belies the inner is an enforced suicide. There is something of
majesty on “laying one’s self down with a will,” and there is
something of strength in cloistering the body for the spirit’s
health’s sake, but to die when all within is warm and clamorous
for life is terrible. Such a death they die who are held together,
not by the bonds of the spirit, but by those of convention. They
who would go from each other and dare not, die the ignominious death of fear. The suicide is contemptible, besides being
pitiable, when he is hounded out of life despite himself, when
he is a little embezzler of a clerk who rushes from the music
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JACK LONDON
hall to the Thames and thinks of the unfi nished glass with his
last breath. No, I do not underestimate the tragedy of the paradox. Yet I say that if love were accountable for it (which it is
not), it would still be folly to forswear love. Do you ask why?
Because its dangers are the dangers common to all life, and
we are so made that we cannot be frightened away from our
portion of experience. We are as loth to give up our nights as
our days. The winters as the summers, all the seasons and all
the climes, the fears as the hopes, all the travail of deepest, fullest living, we claim as our own forever. We guard jealously our
heritage of feeling. Would you for all the world sleep rather
than wake, forget rather than remember? Then cease the requiem of your speech about the dangers of disillusion!
Madness and selfi shness were the cause of Louisa Naveret’s death, and the man who was mad and selfi sh was her
lover. The poor man had not the strength to renounce when
he thought he found himself face to face with the necessity of
renouncing. But all lovers are not too weak to cope with love.
John Ruskin, if you remember, loved his wife, and he shot neither himself, nor her, nor Millais. Charles J. Johnson is not
a Ruskin, and Ruskin’s love was not a madness.
And, Herbert, to me there is nothing comic in a stress of
feeling. Let the lover pale and fl utter and faint; in the presence of his deity it is an acceptable form of worship. The very
self-possessed lover is more preposterous!
Your book has not yet reached me. To-morrow I shall write
again, providing I remember how to write a natural letter.
Yours,
Dane Kempton.
CHAPTER XXIII
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME
London.
June 20, 19–.
There are impersonal hours when the things of the day
drop below consciousness and the spirit grows devotional and
wends a pilgrimage to larger spheres, there to sit apart. Such
a respite was mine to-day. There had been a call to rouse and
put forth work, and I wrought with all the puniness of my
might (woe is me!), and earned my post at the window that
looks out upon the large things. The best of nights and days of
toil is that there comes a twilight in which fatigued eyes see
clear. I said it did not matter how you do about your marriage.
Time may right you in a way I cannot know. I said it did not
matter if you are not righted in this, there being so much that
never rights itself. Both hope and despair were followed by
a calm of neutrality. The inquiry waited no solution. The stress
no longer touched me, and my twilight became luminous.
I saw things as from a height and forms dropped out of my
range, when Barbara came tugging at me, and my pale while of
abstraction was at an end.
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JACK LONDON
She wanted to know what troubled me. She made her
way to me, hurried but resolved, and stated her demand. “You
catechised me yesterday; to-night you shall answer.”
She had come to defend herself. My talk having of late
taken on the sameness of that of the man of one idea, Barbara
was aroused. I was gauging her because she distressed me, was
her thought. (I had been trying to fi nd whether it is possible to
live differently from her and live happily and well.) “You
think I am not close enough to Earl, because I mourn for my
little one, perhaps. You think me not suffi ciently happy to be
wifely.” Could I suppose aught else from such an utterance but
that there was an estrangement and hidden pain? How, unless
there were sorrow, could the woman see herself sorrowed for?
My mind leapt to possibilities. Little Barbara on the rack was
more than I could bear. I groped for her hands. It was a fault in
her to be so much on her guard. She had no sorrow to confess,
and spoke – only to ward off what was not directed toward her.
“The tenour of your talk led me on to believe – ” she stammered with hot cheeks. It is a standing offence of hers to imagine herself accused, and she admits it is a weakness born of
lack of poise. “But I took all for granted, I thought you fortunate beyond any other woman,” I protested. At this the radiance broke forth. I forgave the chill that her fi rst words on
entering the room struck to my heart, and she forgot what she
had imagined.
There is nothing more important than the play and interplay of feeling. Were Barbara “unwifely,” I could not blame
her, but neither could I have at hand my proof of dear miracles.
My proof remained to me, for there she stood, her face lifted
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THE KEMPTON-WACE LETTERS
toward mine, her mouth tremulous, her grey eyes swimming.
The mate woman was stirred. Barbara is twenty-six and has
been married seven years, and she still vibrates with the old
wonder to fi nd herself loving and beloved.
I meant to tell you of what we spoke later, in the hope that
I could show you a little better what I hold dear and why. But
my hand grows nerveless. The twilight of abstraction has set
in. A little while ago this hand was quick to rest on Barbara’s as I called her my heroine. She is that, not alone because
she is pure and good and strong, but because she can accept
the test of her instincts. It takes both faith and strength to obey
oneself. “When shows break up, what but one’s Self remains?”
asks Whitman. The shows are but shows for Barbara. Will
I look into your eyes on the morrow and fi nd them, like hers,
clear? Grant that it be!
Dane.
CHAPTER XXIV
FROM HERBERT WACE TO
DANE KEMPTON
The Ridge,
Berkeley, California.
July 1, 19–.
Somewhere in Ward you may read, “It must constantly be
borne in mind that all progress consists in the arbitrary alteration, by human efforts and devices, of the normal course of nature, so that civilisation is wholly an artifi cial product.” Why,
Dane, this is large enough to base a sociology upon. And I must
ask you fi rst, is it true? Second, do you understand, do you appreciate, the tremendous signifi cance of it? And third, how can
you bring your philosophy of love in accord with it?
Romantic love is certainly not natural. It is an artifi ce,
blunderingly and unwittingly introduced by man into the natural order. Is this audacious? Let us see. In a state of nature
the love which obtains is merely the passion for perpetuation
devoid of all imagination. The male possesses the prehensile
organs and the superior strength. Beyond the ardour of pursuit the female has no charms for him. But he is driven irresistibly to pursuit. And by virtue of his prehensile organs and
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THE KEMPTON-WACE LETTERS
superior strength he ravishes the females of his species and
goes his way. But life creeps slowly upward, increasing in complexity and necessarily in intelligence. When some forgotten
inventor of the older world smote his rival or enemy with
a branch of wood and found that it was good and thereafter
made a practice of smiting rivals and enemies with branches of wood, then, and on that day, artifi ciality may be said to
have begun. Then, and on that day, was begun a revolution
destined to change the history of life. Then, and on that day,
was laid the cornerstone of that most tremendous of artifi ces,
CIVILISATION!
Trace it up. Our ape-like and arboreal ancestors entered
upon the fi rst of many short cuts. To crack a marrow-bone
with a rock was the act which fathered the tool, and between
the cracking of a marrow-bone and the riding down town in
an automobile lies only a difference of degree. The one is
crudely artifi cial, the other consummately artifi cial. That
is all. There have been improvements. The fi rst inventors
grasped that truthful paradox, “the longest way round is
the shortest way home,” and forsook the direct pursuit of
happiness for the indirect pursuit of happiness. If the happiness of a savage depended upon his crossing an extensive body of water, he did not directly proceed to swim it,
but turned his back upon it, selected a tree from the forest,
shaped it with his rude tools and hollowed it out with fi re,
then launched it in the water and paddled toward where his
happiness lay.
Now concerning love. In the state of nature it is a brutal
passion, nothing more. There is no romance attached. But life
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JACK LONDON
creeps upward, and the gregarious human forms social groups
the like of which never existed before. Consider the family
group, for instance. Such a group becomes in itself an entity.
By means of the group man is better enabled to pursue happiness. But to maintain the group it must be regulated; so man
formulates rules, codes, dim ethical laws for the conduct of
the group members. Sexual ties are made less promiscuous and
more orderly. A greater privacy is observed. And out of order
and privacy spring respect and sacredness.
But life creeps upward, and the family group itself becomes but a unit of greater and greater groups. And rules and
codes change in accordance, until the marriage tie becomes
possessed of a history and takes to itself traditions. This history and these traditions form a great fund, to which changing conditions and growing imagination constantly add. And
the traditions, more especially, bear heavily upon the individual, overmastering his natural expression of the love instinct and forcing him to an artifi cial expression of that love
instinct. He loves, not as his savage forebears loved, but as
his group loves. And the love method of his group is determined by its love traditions. Does the individual compare his
beloved’s eyes to the stars – it is a trick of old time which has
come down to him. Does he serenade under her window or
compose an ode to her beauty or virtue – his father did it
before him. In his lover’s voice throb the voices of myriads of
lovers all dead and dust. The singers of a thousand songs are
the ghostly chorus to the song of love he sings. His ideas, his
very feelings are not his, but the ideas and feelings of countless lovers who lived and loved and whose lives and loves are
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THE KEMPTON-WACE LETTERS
remembered. Their mistaken facts and foolish precepts are
his, and likewise their imaginative absurdities and sentimental philanderings. Without an erotic literature, a history of
great loves and lovers, a garland of love songs and ballads,
a sheaf of spoken love tales and adventures – without all
this, which is the property of his group, he could not possibly
love in the way he does.
To illustrate: Isolate a boy babe and a girl babe of cultured breed upon a desert isle. Let them feed and grow
strong on shell-fish and fruit; but let them see none other of their species; hear no speech of mouth, nor acquire
knowledge in any way of their kind and the things their
kind has done. Well, and what then? They will grow to
man and woman and mate as the beasts mate, without romance and without imagination. Does the woman oppose
her will to that of the man – he will beat her. Does he
become over-violent in the manifestation of his regard, she
will flee away, if she can, to secret hiding-places. He will
not compare her eyes to the stars; nor will she dream that
he is Apollo; nor will the pair moon in the twilight over
the love of Hero and Leander. And the many monogamic
generations out of which he has descended would fail to
prevent polygamy did another woman chance to strand on
that particular isle.
It is the common practice of the man of the London
slum to kick his wife to death when she has offended him.
And the man of the London slum is a very natural beast who
expresses himself in a very natural manner. He has never
heard of Hero and Leander, and the comparison of the mis-
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JACK LONDON
sus’ eyes to the stars would to him be arrant bosh. The gentle,
tender, considerate male is an artifi cial product. And so is
the romantic lover, who is fashioned by the love traditions
which come down to him and by the erotic literature to which
he has access.
And now to the point. Romantic love being an artifi cial
product, you cannot base its retention upon the claim that it
is natural. Your only claim can be that it is the best possible
artifi ce for the perpetuation of life, or that it is the only perfect,
all-suffi cient, and all-satisfying artifi ce that man can devise.
On the one hand, for the perpetuation of life, man demonstrates the ineffi ciency of romantic love by his achievements in
the domestic selection of animals. And on the other hand,
the very irrationality of romantic love will tend to its gradual
elimination as the human grows wiser and wiser. Also, because
it is such a crude artifi ce, it forces far too many to contract
the permanent marriage tie without possessing compatibility.
During the time romantic love runs its course in an individual, that individual is in a diseased, abnormal, irrational condition. Mental or spiritual health, which is rationality, makes for
progress, and the future demands greater and greater mental
or spiritual health, greater and greater rationality. The brain
must dominate and direct both the individual and society in
the time to come, not the belly and the heart. Granted that
the function romantic love has served has been necessary; that
is no reason to conclude that it must always be necessary, that
it is eternally necessary. There is such a thing as rudimentary
organs which served functions long since fallen in disuse and
now unremembered.
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